Welcome to the IWCS homepage! IWCS organizes biennial conferences on Computational
Semantics. Until now there have been eight conferences in Tilburg, The Netherlands.
The ninth conference,
IWCS-9, will be held in Oxford in January 2011.

Computational Semantics is to the semantics of natural language what computational
linguistics is to linguistics proper. Natural language semantics studies linguistic
meaning, is interested in generating the truth-conditions of linguistic expressions,
studies the relation of logical inference in ordinary language, describes
the behavior of presuppositions etc. Computational semantics does all these things
too, but is particularly focused on algorithmic
realizations of the relevant notions. Computational semanticists typically are interested
in defining data structures that can deal with the massive ambiguity of natural language. They
are also interested in computing truth-conditions, computing
entailment relations, computing presuppositions, etc. It is clear that
this requires intensive interaction, not only with other subdisciplines of computational
linguistics, but also with other areas, such as knowledge representation, context modelling,
automated inference and model generation. The
last two disciplines study two facets of mechanized reasoning in their full generality;
computational semantics is particularly interested in the case of reasoning in
natural language. Knowledge representation and context modelling study the knowledge
that human reasoning processes must have access to and in which natural language meaning
can be grounded.

IWCS is endorsed by SIGSEM, the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Semantics.